Conceptualising Human Needs and Wellbeing

NEEDS AND WELLBEING: ISSUES AND THEMES
What are the relationships between human needs and human wellbeing? I will address the question by considering the conceptual linkages between these two umbrella categories. This requires investigation of the nature of each of them as a family of concepts. That is attempted in Sections 3 and 4 of the paper. I briefly point to the further topic of their empirical connections in Section 5. Bracketing these discussions, the opening and closing parts of the paper consider and compare human needs and human wellbeing as research programmes. How far is the wellbeing programme a continuation or successor to the tradition of thinking and investigation on human needs, and what lessons may arise from the somewhat troubled history of research on needs?